This Book Is Not Yet Rated Page 2

  Randy had personally loaned his theater over $75,000, guaranteed against the value of the property, but now he was out of money.

  This had been a problem for a long time, and why Randy had never told us about it was anyone’s guess.

  Barring any ability to pay off the debt in full, the university would be forced to demolish the Green Street to make way for a “Residential/Retail establishment.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Once he was done telling me very clearly what this was all about, the man looked at my name tag, which read, “Wendy. Manager,” and asked:

  “You in charge here, Wendy?”

  “I am,” I said.

  He smiled.

  “How old are you?”

  “I am very old,” was my reply.

  He squinted at me with his already squinty eyes. Then he looked around the place, as if for the first time. And it might help to know here that the Green Street was last remodeled in 1935. You know, when Franklin Roosevelt was president. It was originally done in an Art Deco style, which should be really cool. Bold colors and wild geometric shapes. But the glamour had faded over the years.

  Like literally faded.

  We used to have gold wallpaper, but now most of the shine had worn off and it looked like faded tinfoil. The cool old light fixtures hadn’t been wired in years and collected dust on the walls beneath some bad fluorescents. And the concessions counter looked more like an Old Country Buffet than Radio City Music Hall. In short: The Green Street looked like something that used to be awesome, but was now very not-awesome, and possibly full of black mold.

  The man took all this in and then turned back to me.

  “Can I ask you a question?” he said.

  “Free country,” said Griffin from beside me, radiating THC.

  I gave him a look. The man’s gaze bounced around the room.

  “Does anybody actually come to see movies here?” he asked.

  He seemed genuinely curious, like the concept was totally mind-blowing to him. Before I could say anything, though, Lucas chimed in from behind the counter, stuffing a handful of popcorn in his mouth straight from the machine.

  “We cater to an elite clientele,” he said. “True cineastes!”

  The man looked at Lucas like he had just blown a particularly foul odor in his direction.

  “Ah,” he said. “Cineastes.”

  My feelings at the moment were tough to pin down. On one hand, I wanted to murder Lucas for being such a pretentious ass. But I also wanted to hug him for being so wholly himself in the face of this dude. I wanted to start crying. But I also didn’t want to show weakness in front of the enemy. Oddly enough, I also felt like going back into the rat closet. Life had been easier in there.

  I was supposed to say something now—that much was clear—but I didn’t know what to say. So, I did what I always do when I don’t know what to say: I quoted a movie. I have a lot of them memorized. All those post-movie discussions with dad had carved them into my mind.

  Here’s what I came up with:

  “Three weeks from now, I will be harvesting my crops. Imagine where you will be, and it will be so. If you find yourself alone, riding in green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled. For you are in Elysium, and you’re already dead!”

  The man watched me carefully. Then, after a few seconds, he furrowed his sizable brow, and turned around to walk out the door of the theater. At just that moment, however, Sweet Lou, the organ player happened to be showing up for work. She was very old, and quite large, and she walked with an amazing gold-topped cane. And when the polo man opened the door, Sweet Lou wedged herself past him, stomping out her cigarette on the threadbare carpet of the theater in the process.

  “Watch it, honcho,” she said.

  Then she walked off. The man looked down at the smoldering cigarette butt, then at Lou disappearing into the theater, paying him absolutely no attention. He left the building then without uttering another word. When he was gone, Lucas walked over and stood beside me.

  “Was that a line from Gladiator?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “It was.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Huh.”

  Behind us at the concession stand, the popcorn was starting to burn.

  ETHAN’S GLOSSARY OF FILM TERMS

  ENTRY #33

  ESTABLISHING SHOT

  A long shot at the start of a scene that shows you where you are in time and space.

  It might be a spaceship drifting into the frame, a helicopter buzzing over the Gotham skyline.

  Or, it might just be a kid going home to a bungalow in Minneapolis—a house that always feels empty now—after a long day at work.

  3

  I meant to talk to my mom about what was happening that night, but when I got home and tossed my greasy white work shirt in the laundry, she was in the kitchen working on dinner and singing along to the stereo. In the last year or so, she had finally managed to escape the grief that had imprisoned her after my dad was gone. And in addition to finding a new job, and singing more often, she had taken up gourmet cooking.

  I realize I should not be complaining about any of this. I don’t begrudge my mom happiness, and poached rainbow trout with savoy cabbage is objectively delicious. But, there were just a couple of problems.

  1) In her mission to get over the tragedy in her life, she seemed to be forgetting that it had ever happened.

  2) I really missed taco night, where we loaded up store-bought taco shells with neon orange ground beef and shredded lettuce and then ate them while watching the trashiest movie we could find on TV.

  Now the TV was downstairs in the basement, far far away from the kitchen table. And ground beef with seasoning packs was forever banned from Mom’s kitchen.

  “Hey, hey,” said my mom, when I stepped into the kitchen. “The workingman is home.”

  “I am,” I said.

  “Can you set out the low bowls please and some glasses for wine?”

  “Sure,” I said, and opened the door to the cabinet near the counter. I pulled out some stacked bowls and wineglasses.

  The good side of my mom’s gourmand phase is that she let me drink wine with dinner sometimes. Just a glass, but still, if I drank it fast enough, I got the world’s tiniest buzz. The bad side was that I couldn’t help remembering the things Dad used to make: stuffed peppers with lots of cheese, enormous hamburgers cooked to dangerously low temperatures. Something called Zucchini Slop. The house smelled different these days. It was quieter, too. The pauses between sentences were longer, and I found myself always jumping to fill them.

  Mom was dumping out pasta water when I finished with the table, and she appeared before me through a fog of briny steam. Her blond bangs were damp against her forehead. Dad always said she looked like this Italian actress, Monica Vitti, with her long nose and that little gap between her teeth. But to me, she just looked like my mom.

  I could smell the clams and garlic and knew we were having spaghetti vongole, which was her specialty.

  “How was the theater today?” she asked.

  “Fine,” I said. “Sweet Lou fell asleep at the organ again.”

  “Of course she did.”

  “Her head landed right on D-flat during the opening credits of the matinee. A woman screamed.”

  Mom laughed, but not the way she used to. This was just a soft chuckle. A half laugh at best. She wasn’t a huge fan of my extra responsibilities at the Green Street. She thought I should be concentrating on retaking the SATs or looking into humanitarian work if I was planning to take a “gap year.”

  That’s what she called my plan for next year. A gap year. Even though the word “gap” implied a space between things, and I had no idea what the next thing would be. Can there be a gap with nothing on the other side? A
cliff year?

  I had graduated early from high school thanks to a boatload of AP credits from the good old days. Mom was surprisingly cool with my early graduation, but her pride had turned quickly to anxiety when I showed no immediate interest in college.

  “Can you finish chopping this basil?” she asked now, and pointed toward a cutting board. I walked over and picked up her ridiculously expensive Japanese chef’s knife. It was sharp enough to take off a digit if you didn’t concentrate.

  “How about a chiffonade?” she said.

  She had been trying for a year to teach me some knife skills. A chiffonade, for those of you who don’t work at a Michelin-starred restaurant, is a cut that makes perfect little herb strings. You do it by folding the herbs and making tiny slices, and it takes about a hundred forevers unless you’re a pro.

  I am not a pro.

  Still, I lined up the basil, folded it over, and started the intricate work of slicing through the herbs to the rib.

  “Guess who I saw today at the farmer’s market?” she asked.

  She was stirring her sauce into the pasta now, her newly toned arm whirling in circles.

  “Roger Deakins?”

  She stopped stirring.

  “Who?”

  “Roger Deakins. The fourteen-time Academy Award–nominated cinematographer who worked on such films as No Country for Old Men and The Shawshank Redemption.”

  “No,” my mom said, “not him.”

  “Oh,” I said, “who then?”

  I finished one side of the basil leaves and flipped them over.

  “Trinity Allen,” she said.

  I stopped the knife before almost cutting off the tip of my thumb.

  “As in . . .” I said.

  “As in Raina’s mom,” she said.

  “Mmm,” I said.

  I was no longer chiffonading. I had not heard either of the names my mom had just uttered in a very long time. Well, I had read about them on websites, but I had not heard them spoken aloud. And this was because the owners of those names used to live nearby us, but now they did not. They used to be frequent topics of conversation and now they were not. And most importantly, I used to think I would marry Raina Allen, perhaps in a Scottish castle overlooking some moors, whatever those are, but now I did not.

  “She’s coming home for a while,” my mom said.

  “She as in . . .”

  “She as in Raina. The girl you wanted to marry in a Scottish castle.”

  “Who told you about that?”

  “You wrote it on your wall in Magic Marker,” she said.

  I poured myself a tall glass of wine.

  “Hey! Easy tiger,” said Mom, pointing at my glass. “Pour some of that back.”

  I sighed and dumped half my glass into hers, spilling a citrusy splash on the tablecloth. I watched it soak into the fibers.

  “I thought she was shooting the sequel to that dystopic cats thing,” I said.

  My mom grabbed my ill-chopped basil and garnished a few perfectly swirled pasta towers.

  “She was replaced,” my mom said. “Apparently something didn’t go well. I think she’s having a tough time. Maybe you should give her a call.”

  I watched the steam rise off the pasta in front of me, but I was no longer hungry. I got up and took my wine to my bedroom where I lay down on my bed and turned on a movie by one of my dad’s favorite directors. Federico Fellini. This one was called 8 1/2. From what I could tell, it was about a dashing man who wanders around, ignoring beautiful women for three hours. I tried my best to experience his sophisticated boredom, but my heart was beating so fast, I thought it might explode.

  4

  I fell in love with Raina Allen the day she brought her diorama to class in third grade. It was a project for the school science fair. We had been assigned mandatory projects in November, a series of boring topics that mostly had to do with measuring precipitation levels and learning about the various flatulent land mammals of our region. But Raina had raised her hand when we got our projects and said, “Mrs. Boswell, I don’t want to be a pain, but I think it would be better if I did a diorama.”

  And Mrs. Boswell, who spent a decent amount of time squashing the dreams of Raina and others like her, froze for a minute. I could see even with my puny third-grade powers of perception that she was on the verge of saying “Nope. Sorry. Precipitation levels for you.” But maybe because she was distracted, or in a rare good mood, or bored out of her mind at the thought of seeing another graph of Minnesota snowfall, said, “Okay, Raina. But don’t make me regret this decision.”

  And Raina meanwhile had this look on her face like: Okay, Mrs. Boswell, you can send your teacher threats my way, but I AM going to make you regret your decision because this diorama is going to BLOW YOUR FUCKING MIND. And sure enough, when Raina brought her project to our pathetic little science fair in the cafeteria on a slushy December morning, it was nothing short of astonishing.

  Imagine, if you will, a large box.

  Now imagine eyeholes cut into this box.

  I can see you being underwhelmed, but stay with me.

  Because now you walk up to this large, unsuspecting box and adjust your face so that your eyes line up perfectly with those eyeholes. You blink a few times, and it takes a second for your eyes to adjust to the dim red light that has been switched on inside. But when your vision clears you see a battle between two 12,000-year-old woolly mammoths rendered in photo-realist detail.

  There they are: constructed in clay, frozen mid-attack, their tusks tangled together in a grapple for dominance. One of them is falling down, but he hasn’t quite reached the ground yet, his mouth constricted in an angry mammoth death grimace. The other lunges forward, his leg pierced from a prior attack from the now-victim. In the background is a watching herd of tiny mammoths surrounded by a canopy of giant dinosaur-times ferns. And in the sky above them, a red sun blazing.

  That is what I saw inside that box.

  And what I felt was joy. Not admiration, at least not right away. Not jealousy. Just pure unadulterated joy. The box was like a movie. A movie that didn’t move. And it elicited the same joy I would feel later when I watched the Millennium Falcon jump to light speed for the first time, or the DeLorean disappear at the end of Back to the Future or later still when Ben and Elaine are running from the church in The Graduate, stumbling onto a bus completely unsure of what’s coming next, with only their flawed love to guide them. The kind of joy that plucks you, temporarily, out of your life.

  And when I finally pulled away from that diorama and locked in on Raina’s expectant eyes, I was speechless. What I wanted to say was: I love you, Raina. And while I don’t really know what moors are, I am going to find out someday and then we are going to get married on some. But once I found myself able to actually utter words again, I think I said something like: “Cool mammoths.” To which Raina nodded, and then went back to being effortlessly awesome.

  And that was that.

  It was my first experience with unrequited love. It would not be my last. But for the moment, Raina Allen could do no wrong in my eyes. I must have realized on some level that she did not just exist for me. Her role was not to make my life awesome. Her mammoths were not created just to expand my sense of wonder. She made them for herself. She made them for the progress of third-grade science.

  No matter the reason, I just knew I wanted to be near her.

  So for the rest of elementary school, I watched her from afar, occasionally joining one of her elaborate role-playing games at recess, happy to be given the part of the robot dog in a sci-fi epic or, more than once, “bumbling squire” to the first female Knight of the Round Table. She rarely said my name, and each year on Valentine’s Day, when I chose the best cartoon franchise valentine for her and tucked it into her cardboard mailbox, I allowed myself the hope that she might finally reciprocate my
feelings of adoration. But her valentines were never personalized, and she never let me know she had received mine. And that’s the way things went until we left the halls of Hillcrest Elementary.

  In sixth grade, though, things began to change.

  In grade school, Raina had held us in sway with her strange ways. No one cared that she cut off her bangs with safety scissors in art class. Or that she ate ketchup with a spoon. No one cared because weird was cool in grade school. Weird was fun. Weird made the games better and the days go faster.

  Then, in junior high, suddenly weird took a fall from grace. Weird was no longer cool. Weird was wrong and bad and embarrassing. At least according to the eighth-grade overlords who controlled everything with their perfectly timed eye rolls and shrugs and new boobs and amazingly fragrant lip gloss. They took one look at Raina with her messy blond hair and boys’ shoes, and they decided that she was anonymous.

  Anonymous like me.

  We met again in gym class, the great equalizer. Well, we met outside gym class technically, both of us using the same evasion tactic of a bathroom break. The hallway outside the sweat-fogged gymnasium had two drinking fountains side by side, and we both took a drink and then hesitated to go back in where the terrible sounds of a game called Prison Ball were echoing around. It doesn’t matter if you know what Prison Ball is. It has the word “prison” in it. That should give you the gist.

  “Ethan, right?” she said.

  And then I’m pretty sure I choked on some water I was trying to swallow.

  “Yeah,” I squeaked.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Oh. Some water went down the wrong tube, but I think I’m okay.”

  “No,” she said. “I mean how did we get here? How did this happen?”

  I listened to one of my Prison Ball teammates screaming like a Viking raider inside the gym. I didn’t know how to answer Raina’s question.